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Sunday, 8 October 2017

So, the Ten
Commandments. Which is what we heard read in our first reading
today, and which we very often hear if it is a Communion service.
Totally familiar, aren’t they? Or are they?

I do wonder why they
are special. If you ever read these first few books of the Bible –
not Genesis, so much, but Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy,
the ones they call the Pentateuch – you’ll know they are full of
commandments and rules for how God’s people are to live. Do sit
down sometime with a good modern translation – there are plenty
on-line if you haven’t got a paper one – and have a read of them
if you haven’t already.

But the thing about
these rules is that many of them – perhaps most of them – are no
longer relevant to us. We don’t see anything wrong in eating pork
or shellfish, or in wearing polycotton or other mixed fibres. Many
of us enjoy a cheeseburger from time to time. We think slavery is
wrong – nobody should own another person – and that even the very
generous laws about it in the Scriptures should be discarded in
favour of a blanket ban. Why are the Ten Commandments any different?

I once saw on
television some programme – it was years ago, and I can’t now
remember what it was about or in what context we were watching it –
when they asked random people off the streets to quote the Ten
Commandments. Most people knew some or all of the last six, but
nobody even thought to quote the first four!

And that’s the thing,
isn’t it? The first four commandments are all to do with our
relationship with God, and whatever else may change, God doesn’t.
So we are told that we must not worship any other God; we mustn’t
make statues or pictures and then worship them; we mustn’t make
empty promises in God’s name and we must keep the Sabbath day
rather special. And those are the commandments people don’t
remember, unless they happen to be God’s people, because they
simply aren’t relevant to them.

You know, if you think
about it, the Ten Commandments are really about how you should think,
and what sort of a person you should be. Most of the other sets of
rules in the Pentateuch are about how a nomadic tribe that is just
beginning to settle down should live. How to stay healthy and happy.
Rules about what to eat and what not – no carrion, for instance.
How sensible – an animal who died and you don’t know why might
easily make you very ill. Rules about whether you have an infectious
skin disease or just a boil or burn. Rules about what to do with your
mildewed garments. But even these rules have, running through them,
the refrain that it is to please God that people will do these
things, and that if they do them,

The Israelites, of
course, were not claiming land nobody had ever cultivated before.
They were settling down among, and displacing, local tribes, and
learning to farm for their living rather than be hunter-gatherers, as
they had had, perforce, to be while wandering in the desert. We know
that God had provided manna for them, although nobody seems to know
what that is, but it was certainly their staple food for many years,
supplemented by occasional flocks of quail. But now they are
beginning to remember the stories their grandparents told them of
what the food had been like in Egypt: fish, meat, leeks, onions,
cucumbers, garlic, good wheaten bread.... and now they were settling
down, they could grow things like that and enjoy the good life for
themselves. But how? None of them had ever been farmers.

But their neighbours
had. And for them, much of the ritual about farming involved going
to their local shrine and worshipping their local god. Their god
didn’t demand any kind of involvement on their part, only the
ritual – but, of course, this was absolutely Not On for God’s
people once they had reached the Promised Land. They must not go and
worship other gods, no matter how perfunctorily. They need to be
God’s people, body, mind and spirit. And so the rules are shot
through with exhortations to be just that, to choose to be God’s
people, to choose life.

As I said, we consider
many, if not most, of those rules to be inappropriate today. The
food rules went very early on – Jesus himself declared all foods
clean, although people didn’t understand that until a bit later.
But as it became obvious that you could be a Christian without being
Jewish first, so the various rules gradually fell into abeyance among
Christians who had not grown up thinking that this was what Proper
People did. Sadly, some of the better rules disappeared, too – the
one that said that every seven years you kept the land fallow, freed
your slaves, and generally started again from scratch. The ones that
applied to slavery – these days, we would not, by and large, dream
of owning other people, although sadly it does still happen, even
here in Brixton – anyway, the laws that applied to slavery were
very lenient and although slaves must be freed every 7 years, they
didn’t have to go if they didn’t want to. And if they ran away
in between, it was considered not to be their fault – their masters
must have been too harsh with them. Sadly, as we know, these laws,
too, fell into abeyance and slavery became the horrible thing we know
it to be.

But these rules that we call the Ten Commandments didn’t fall into
abeyance. They were different, special. The first four, as I said,
are about our relationship with God. Then come the common-sense
regulations: to honour our parents (the first commandment, as St Paul
points out, that comes with a promise attached – “Do this so that
you will have a full life in the land that the Lord your God gives
you.”). No murder, no adultery, no theft.... all societies have had
some sort of rules about these things, even if not quite the same as
ours. No lying about other people. And then the commandment that
lifts even these out of the realm of blind obedience, and on to
another plane, entirely: Thou shalt not covet!

That is the commandment St Paul talked about in his letter to the
Romans: “For I would not have known what coveting really was if the
law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ But sin, seizing the
opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of
coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead. Once I was alive
apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life
and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to
bring life actually brought death. For sin, seizing the opportunity
afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment
put me to death.”

In other words, as soon
as he realised it was wrong to covet, he discovered how much he did
covet, and couldn’t overcome it himself. We can’t, either.
After all, there are whole industries based on the human propensity
to covet – you only have to watch television briefly to be
inundated with advertising, telling you about products you might not
have known you wanted. And if you watch sports channels, as we do
sometimes, you’ll have noticed how many of these ads are devoted to
on-line gambling sites. Gambling, if it tempts you – it doesn’t
tempt me, so I’m not being virtuous not doing it – if it tempts
you, it is tempting you to want something for nothing, a great deal
of money for almost no effort or expenditure on your part. “We’ll
pay out, win or lose!” they cry. “We’ll give you ten pounds
for every pound you spend with us.” Golden rule of advertising: if
it sounds too good to be true, it almost definitely is!

Mind you, some ads are
good and useful – the ones that tell you when, say, an insurance
company is giving special offers, or when a sale is on. At least,
they are useful if you actually happen to want insurance, or whatever
it is. As my mother always says, coupons are lovely if it’s
something you actually want, but a snare and a delusion if you buy
something you didn’t really need or want simply because you have a
20% off coupon!

But the point is,
coveting isn’t really something we can help. It is part of our
human nature to want what we do not have, or, worse, to want what
someone else has. We can happily refrain from murder, adultery or
theft, and we can at least go through the motions of honouring our
parents and worshipping God – but we can’t not covet! At least,
not without God’s help.

Of course, some
religions – Buddhism, for instance – require one to be so
divorced from the material world that not coveting is basically a
matter of total disdain. It’s not like that for us. We need to be
living in this world, engaged in it, working in it for justice and
peace. And we will inevitably start to want things we don’t have,
and to own things we don’t really want, and all the other things.
In Jesus’ story he told, that we also heard read this morning, the
tenants of the vineyard wanted to keep all the grapes for themselves,
rather than yield them to their rightful owner, and all sorts of
murder and mayhem ensued. And, if you remember, when the rich young
ruler asked Jesus how he could gain eternal life, and said that he’d
kept all the commandments, Jesus told him to sell all he had and give
it to the poor, and then to come and follow him. But he couldn’t
do that – he coveted his belongings too much.

Well then, how to stop?
How do we learn to value our stuff, but not be so terribly attached
to it that it would be a disaster not to have it any more? Well, if
you ever find out, let me know! Seriously, though, the only way I
know that might even begin to work is to become more and more God’s
person, to allow God to work more and more deeply in your life, to
become more and more the people God created us to be. And even then,
we’ll probably still covet, because human beings do! But, thanks
be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ, the way of forgiveness is
there for us. Amen.

Sunday, 20 August 2017

Sunday, 30 July 2017

Imagine, if you will,
that there is a place you’ve always wanted to visit. It sounds as
though it’s really wonderful – permanently great weather,
fantastic scenery, lots of great places to visit, lots of walking, or
swimming, great bars and restaurants, you name it, this place has it!
And you long and long to go there, but you don’t know how to get
there, and what’s more, you don’t know anybody else who has been
there. All the things you’ve heard about it are rumour or hearsay.

And then one day
someone comes along who very obviously has been there, and he starts
to tell you all about it. But – oh dear – it’s not at all what
you thought! Weeds everywhere, attracting masses of birds which
could and did eat all the crops! And the food, far from gourmet, is
rotten bread made by women! And then, he goes on to tell his special
friends in private – but you hear about it later – the place is
so infinitely desirable that people sell all they have to get tickets
there!

Well, the place is, of
course, the Kingdom of Heaven, or God’s country, which Jesus is
telling people about. Unfortunately it seems to be the kind of place
that doesn’t go into words very well, and the parables that Jesus
uses to talk about it are, although we don’t hear it much as we are
so familiar with them, really not what his listeners would have been
expecting.

To start with, the
mustard seeds – well, you know mustard seeds. I expect you use
them in your cooking, as I sometimes do. You can buy the seeds, or
you can buy the ground seeds as a powder to make your own mustard –
lovely in salad dressings and cheese sauces – or you can buy
ready-made mustard with or without various flavourings. I’m sure
they used mustard as a seasoning back in Bible times, too – but it
was, and is, a terrific weed. They tended to use the wild plant,
because if you cultivated it – well, it was like kudzu or
rhododendrons, or even mint – you’d never get rid of it! Nobody
would actually go and plant it, any more than you or I would plant
stinging-nettles in the fields. And, of course, it doesn’t grow
into a terrific tree, never has and never will. But it does attract
birds – and you don’t want birds eating all your other crops,
either! Yet in God’s country it seems as if you plant mustard and
it does grow into a tree, and you actively want to encourage birds,
rather than discourage them.

And then the second
story is almost worse. You see, for Jews, what was really holy and
proper to eat was unleavened bread, which you had at Passover. You
threw out all your old leaven – we’d call it a sourdough starter,
today, which is basically what it is – and started again. I
remember being told in primary school that this was a Good Idea
because you need fresh starter occasionally. But the thing is,
leavened bread was considered slightly inferior – and the leaven
itself, the starter – yuck! It isn’t even the bread that is
likened to God’s country, it is the leaven itself! And did you
notice – it was a woman who took that leaven. A woman! That won’t
do at all! Again, for male Jews, women were slightly improper –
and who knew that she wouldn’t be bleeding and therefore unclean?
And she hid the starter in enough flour to make bread for 100 people!
She hid it. It was concealed, hidden.

Not what people would
expect from God’s country, is it?

And yet, in the stories
Jesus told his disciples privately, a little later, it’s like
treasure hidden in a field, and it’s worth selling everything you
own just to get hold of that field, and its hidden treasure. Or the
one perfect pearl that the collector has been searching for, and he
finds it worth selling the rest of his collection to buy it. God’s
country is worth all we have, and all we are.Li

It’s all very
contradictory. God’s country is totally not what we might expect.
It’s not a comfortable place – when Jesus told the story of the
lost son, he explained that the son was reduced to looking after
pigs, a job which the Jews, then and now – and Muslims, too,
incidentally – thought was really disgusting. Perhaps we could
think of him as working in a rat farm, or a sewage works.... not a
pleasant job, anyway. And yet the father went running to welcome him
home – and men in that day and age never ran. The story is taking
place in God’s country!

And if we want to be
part of it, part of God’s country – as, indeed, we probably do or
we’d not be here this morning – if we want to be part of the
Kingdom of God, then we need to expect the unexpected. Someone once
said that God comes to comfort the afflicted, and to afflict the
comfortable, and I think that’s very true. Often we are called to
do things we never expected.

I read an article in
the Guardian recently*, about a parish in Stoke on Trent who finds
itself called to minister to Muslim refugees, many of whom have found
themselves turned away by their local mosques, and some of whom have
come to faith in Jesus. But, sadly, the congregation isn’t very
receptive to what has been happening. The vicar, the Revd Sally
Smith, is quoted as saying “I have had a lot of opposition.
Criticism, negative attitudes and trying to undermine the work that
we are doing – that’s from the white British congregation.

“I have lost lots of
congregation members because of what has happened at the church. They
don’t want the hassle and they don’t want the church being messed
up. They see the church as having a very definite role and opening
the doors to refugees isn’t one of them.

“They expected a
vicar’s role to be looking after the people inside the church and
one of the insults often levelled at me is: ‘She cares more about
the people outside the church than those inside.’ Well, this is
what I am meant to be doing and you’re meant to be doing it with
me. We should be doing this together.”

Indeed, surely the
church should be the institution that cares more about those who are
not yet its members! And it’s a great pity the regular
congregation has reacted like that. Sadly, though, not surprising –
look what happened when the Empire Windrush came over and the people
on it turned up in Church their first Sunday, only to be turned away.
Of course, God used that for good and we saw the rise of the
Black-led churches, which have done so very much good in our inner
cities, but even still.

Anyway, another thing I
found interesting from the article came a little further on. Again,
I quote the minister: “With the mass movement from across the world
we have got people of faith coming into secular society and faith
really matters to them. And they are not too bothered, as bothered
as we may think, about how that faith is expressed.

“In our secular
mindsets we have all these great divides from different faiths but
what I am finding is that they don’t conform to these divides and
they just want to come to a place of worship, whatever that place is
– they don’t seem to distinguish as much as we would have
expected them to. Our help that we offer is in no way related to
converting them. The most important thing for me is for people to be
able to pray in our church whatever their faith.”

“The most important
thing for me is for people to be able to pray in our church whatever
their faith.”

That, to me, sounds
like God’s country – doesn’t it to you? Of course, the church
works hard to provide basic necessities for the refugees, and I think
an awful lot of the burden falls on the vicar, but I imagine that as
people become more settled they will be able to help.

In God’s country,
values are turned upside down. It’s not the wealthy, the educated,
the important who matter. It’s the poor, the downtrodden, the
refugee, the single mum on benefits.... Remember how Jesus said
that at the last day, he will say to those who did nothing to help
“You didn’t help me!” and will commend those who did help for
helping him.

Talking of single
parents, do remember, won’t you, that this can be a very hard time
of year for many families – they might just be able to cope in term
time when the children get a meal at school, but in the holidays they
struggle and have need of our food banks, so do give extra when you
can.

I don’t know about you, but I am not very good at recognising Jesus
in the beggar outside Tesco, or even the checkout operator inside the
store. And yet we know that in God’s country, we are all loved and
valued, whoever we are and whatever our story is. And, as we heard
from St Paul earlier: “Nothing can separate us from his love:
neither death nor life, neither angels nor other heavenly rulers or
powers, neither the present nor the future, neither the world above
nor the world below – there is nothing in all creation that will
ever be able to separate us from the love of God which is ours
through Christ Jesus our Lord.”

And however
disconcerting we may find God’s country, we know that because of
that love, it is worth all we have, and it is worth all we are.
Amen.

Sunday, 16 July 2017

The story that Jesus
told of the sowing of the seeds, and what became of them, is one of
the first we ever learn, isn’t it? We drew pictures, in Sunday
School, or in our primary school Scripture lessons, of the sower,
with his trayful of seeds, and squiggly seagulls swooping down to
grab them before they could take root, hot sun shining on others, and
lovely scribbly weeds choking still others.... and a few, just a very
few, ears of wheat standing up in a field.

And then, perhaps, as
we grew older and began to stay in Church rather than go to Sunday
School, we would hear sermons on this parable, and if you are
anything like me, what you heard – not, I should emphasize,
necessarily what had been said, but what you heard – was that
Proper People, or perhaps I should say Proper Christians, were the
ones who were the fertile soil, where the Word could take root, grow
and flourish.

But, of course, if you
were anything like me, that just made you feel guilty and miserable –
what if you weren’t the good soil? What if you were the stony
places, or the weedy patches? And I’m sure that there are times
when we do allow other things to take priority, perhaps when we ought
not. And there are times when we do rather wither up, in times of
spiritual drought. All of us go through them, of course. But it
doesn’t help when the preacher starts banging on about how dreadful
we are if we are not 100% fully fertile soil, and bearing fruit 100%.
We just end up feeling guilty and thinking that we must be terrible
people.

But I don’t think
Jesus meant us to think that! After all, we are told over and over
again how much we are loved, and St Paul reminds us, in the reading
we heard from his letter to the Romans, that if we live according to
the Spirit, we won’t be the barren ground Jesus talks about! Of
course, again, if you are like me, you’re apt to think that you
can’t possibly be living according to the Spirit, because,
pride.... but that’s stupid! Why would we not be, if we are
committed to being Jesus’ person? You might remember last week’s
reading, where St Paul was being upset about the fact that he found
it nearly impossible not to do wrong things, but now he is triumphant
– God’s Spirit enables him to live as he should. And us, too.

Going back to the story
of the sower for a moment, I think that it’s not so much that any
given one of us is barren ground, or weedy, or stony, or fertile –
but that each of us has all of those characteristics within us.
Think, for a moment. Sometimes it’s really easy to be God’s
person, we can’t think of anything else we’d rather be. Other
times, not so much! Times when we are tempted to sin, or times when
we want to do something that isn’t necessarily sinful, but isn’t
going to help our spiritual lives. Times when we know God is asking
us to do something that we would really rather not.... you know the
kind of thing.

But the thing is, if –
or rather as – we are living according to the Spirit, we are able
to allow God to help us grow and change. We don’t have to struggle
to be good, we don’t have to struggle to turn ourselves into
fertile ground! That part of it is God’s job. All we have to do
is to be willing to let that happen.

And, meanwhile,
sometimes we are the sowers ourselves – often, maybe, we don’t
even know it. Again, it’s probably as well when we don’t –
nothing worse than a rather forced presentation of the Gospel as
someone tries to explain, embarrassed, why they follow Christ. But
sometimes, who knows, just a “Good morning”, or a smile in the
right place can tip the balance for someone who may have been
despairing; a box of pasta or even tampons in the food bank box might
make all the difference to someone’s summer holidays.

I was reading about a
church in Colorado whose congregation was mostly elderly, with no
young families, but who wanted, and prayed for, a youth group. One
day, their minister was sitting in a coffee shop when he was
approached by a group of young people who asked whether his church
was a place where people could say goodbye to friends who had died.
He explained that it was, and they explained that one of their
friends had just died of an overdose, but his parents had taken his
body home before there could be any funeral. The young people were
allowed to use the church to hold their own funeral – no hymns or
prayers, but they spent time telling stories about their friend, and
then ate a meal that church members had prepared for them. One of
them said “Oh, I wish we could eat like this every week – it
reminds me of my grandma’s cooking!” And the church members said
“Well, of course you can – we’re here every Sunday; you come
and bring your friends!” Those young people may never attend
worship at that Church, but the congregation still loves them and
cares for them and feeds them every Sunday.

Nearer home, a friend
of a friend had four tiny children, including twins, when her husband
was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She was left widowed, but her
local church stepped up to the mark and started to care for her,
bringing her meals, babysitting, finding clothes for the children
that, perhaps, their own children had outgrown but which were still
good, and generally caring for her. I believe that she is now a
pillar of that church, although before her husband died she had no
idea of faith.

What I’m trying to
say is that often it’s not what we say that is the seed we are
sowing, it’s what we do. And not putting pressure on people –
the church in Colorado knew that they would lose the young people if
they started insisting they came to church, or even conformed to any
kind of dress code when they entered the building. My friend’s
church knew that someone with four small children would find coming
to church very difficult, even if they had wanted to come.

We may never be in
exactly that sort of situation, but there will always be times when
we are called to love people into the Kingdom of God. Our duty is to
do the loving we’re called to do – and it’s God’s job to
worry about the results! Whether the seed falls on the path, or on
stony ground, weedy ground, or a fertile field isn’t our business –
our job is to sow the seeds. And our job is also to allow God the
Holy Spirit to live in us and transform more and more of us into
fertile ground in which God’s Word can bear fruit.

I want to conclude this
morning by giving a brief testimony of God’s love and care for me.
I got a bad pain in my ribs last week, and because it wasn’t going
away, I took it to the doctor. Who decided that it was probably
nothing, but that I ought to go to A&E anyway, just in case. So
I hopped on the first bus that came along and went up to Tommy’s.
Well, if you’ve been to hospital lately you’ll know how much of
it is hurry up and wait. To be fair, most of the waiting is while
test results are coming in – and they did do a great many tests,
and ended up keeping me in overnight. And then in the morning they
said I would have to have a CAT scan. Which duly happened, and then
it was hurry up and wait all over again. I was just thinking that if
I’d known there would be all this palaver, I wouldn’t have gone
to the doctor in the first place, when they came to tell me that not
only did I have a chest infection, I had blood clots on both lungs!

Well, that part of it
is all under control with various medications, and I’m fine – but
what if I hadn’t gone to the doctor? What if the doctor hadn’t
sent me to A&E, which she only did as a precaution? What if....

Well, we are never told
what would have happened, but I get a bit cold thinking that I had
rather a narrow escape! And I can’t help thinking how wonderful God
is to prompt me to go to the doctor in the first place, and to prompt
the doctor to send me to A&E – and, maybe, to prompt the
medical team there to ensure I had the CAT scan. God is good!

God is good, and, going
back to our theme, if we say “Yes” to God, God will help us
become more and more fertile ground for growing seed and producing
fruit; God will help us live by the Spirit, the life that leads to
life. And God will help us sow seeds that may or may not fall in
fertile ground. Amen.

Sunday, 25 June 2017

This was a repeat of this sermon from three years ago. Obviously things were changed slightly to reflect current events, and also because today is Eid al-Fitr, which needed to be mentioned. But the text is largely the same.

Sunday, 18 June 2017

I wonder whether you
can remember when you first made a conscious decision to be Jesus’
person?

I know some people
can’t remember, they have been Jesus’ person all their lives and
it would never have occurred to them to do otherwise. And some
people know that once upon a time they were not Christians, but their
journey to God was such a slow, gradual and yet purposeful one that
they can’t point to a given day when they were a Christian, yet
were not the day before.

And others have a
definite date that they can point to and say “Then. That was the
day I became a Christian.” I sort-of have that. In many ways the
second Sunday in October, the best part of fifty years ago, was the
day for me, but in fact, there was a lot of stuff that went before
it, and a great deal more that came after it. It didn’t happen in
a vacuum, although it felt a bit like that at the time.

I was just a child
then, eighteen years old and on my own in Paris. I was rather lonely
and having trouble making friends, and my grandmother suggested I
went along to the English church to see whether they had any
activities for young people. They most certainly did, and it didn’t
take long for me to hear a sermon on “Behold, I stand at the door
and knock.....”. And this was obviously the thing you did if you
wanted to be accepted by this group of people..... so..... I’m so
glad God is gracious and loved me anyway!

But the reason I’m
raking up ancient history like this is that when you had become a
Christian, as it was called, you were expected to attend the weekly
Bible Study as well as the more formal teaching sessions which took
place on a Wednesday. The Bible Studies were small discussion
groups, people roughly the same age, peer-led. The minister stayed
away, on the grounds that people needed to learn to read the
Scriptures for themselves, not just be taught what to think. And it
was noticeable that, very often, if we had got stuck with something,
he would talk about the very thing we’d got stuck on in the
Wednesday teaching sessions.

This form of studying
the Bible was new to me – attending Bible Study and prayer meetings
– the two tended to merge, rather – was not something that was
done at the school I attended, or at my parents’ church. So I can
still remember the very first passage I ever studied with my
contemporaries, and do you know, it was that very passage from Romans
that we’ve just heard read. We used the Good News Bible, only back
then it was only the Good News New Testament:

“Now that we have been put right with God through faith, we have
peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. He has brought us by
faith into this experience of God's grace, in which we now live. And
so we boast of the hope we have of sharing God's glory!”

“Now that we have
been put right with God through faith” The trouble is, all those
years ago I got the emphasis wrong! I thought it was my faith that
mattered, not God’s promises. I thought this was something I had
to do, that I had to desperately manufacture faith, and never doubt,
not for a single, solitary minute!

Wasn’t I silly! It
is, of course, what God does that matters. We believe that God will
put us right with him, and so God does. The technical term, which
some translations use, is “justification”. All that really means
is being put right with God. All the nasty squirmy bits of ourselves
that we really don’t want God to look at too closely – and that,
come to that, we don’t actually want to look at too closely
ourselves – they are – not swept away, sadly, much though we
might like that to happen. Quite the reverse; they are brought out
into the light so that we can look at them and God can look at them
and say – okay, that needs to change. And then, if we are
sensible, we allow God to change us.

That, of course, is a
very long process, and will probably never be completely finished
this side of heaven. That’s what we call “sanctification”,
being made holy, being made whole, being made more like God, being
made more into the person we were created to be. But the point is,
God doesn’t make us wait until we are perfect before he will put up
with us. All the nasty squirmy bits, what the jargon calls “Sin”,
God decrees they no longer exist. They do, of course, and we deal
with them in due course, but the point is, they no longer come
between us and God.

I once read a
definition that I found really helpful. Suppose there was a law that
said you mustn’t jump in mud puddles. Well, who can resist jumping
in mud puddles? But you end up no only guilty of breaking the law,
but also covered in mud. When we are put right with God –
justified – we are declared “not guilty” of breaking that law.
And as we become made more into the person we were created to be –
sanctified – it is as if, with God’s help, we washed off the mud.

Like all analogies it’s
not perfect, but I found it helpful, back in the day, and offer it
for what it’s worth.

But I really do think
the most important thing that I’ve learnt in all the years since
that first Bible study, so long ago, is that I don’t have to do the
putting right! As I said earlier, I got the emphasis all wrong, and
thought it was all down to me. I ended up thinking I had to be
perfect because Jesus died on the cross for me, and how ungrateful
would it be ever to sin again?

But it’s not like that. Our salvation doesn’t depend on what we
do. We all need to be saved, and we all can be saved – these days,
I’m not entirely sure what I mean by “saved”, and it’s one of
those words that I suspect we all interpret slightly differently, but
that doesn’t matter. The point is, we don’t have to – and,
indeed, we can’t – save ourselves. God does that. All we have
to do is to reach out, to say “Yes please!” and accept what is on
offer. “Listen,” says Jesus, according to the book of
Revelation, “Listen! I stand at the door and knock; if any hear my
voice and open the door, I will come into their house and eat with
them, and they will eat with me.”

Of course, one
shouldn’t really take a verse out of context like that, but it is a
helpful illustration. All we need do is open the door to Jesus –
and then let go. Then we are put right with God by faith, we do have
peace with God, and we can relax and allow God to re-create us into
the person we were designed to be. That bit isn’t always easy –
far from it – but it’s worth it.

Those who know me well
know that I often have an illustration of a butterfly somewhere about
my person. That’s because it reminds me of how God is working, and
will continue to work, in my life. Think how a butterfly is made.
How does it start life? And how does it go on? The actual butterfly
bit, the beautiful bit, is a very tiny part of its life; some species
last no more than a day or so, if that. Mayflies, for instance,
don’t even have mouths – all that they are interested in is
reproducing themselves, finding a mate, laying their eggs, if female,
and then dying. And the whole cycle takes two years or so to fulfil.

And when they actually
go to become a butterfly, or mayfly, or dragonfly, or whatever insect
they are due to become, the caterpillar has to pupate. That isn’t
just a matter of hibernating, like a dormouse or bear; they have to
be completely remade. While they are in the pupa, all their bits
dissolve away, and are made from scratch, from the material that is
there. It’s not just a matter of rearranging what is there, it’s
a matter of total breakdown and starting again.

It’s just as well, I
think, that butterflies and the like aren’t sentient. Imagine how
awful it would be if they were aware what was going to happen to
them! Think how terrified you’d be if you knew it was going to
happen to you. To be completely remade into something utterly
different. Something so different that it uses a totally different
medium to move about in, the air. Caterpillars are creeping
creatures, that move on the earth and on plants, and the larvae of
things like mayflies and dragonflies are water insects, that can’t
breathe in the air. Even more different!

And yet, we believe
that something of the sort is going to happen to us one day, when we
die and are raised from death into our new life. To a certain
extent, of course, that happens, and is happening right now, here on
earth, which is why God has already started to work in us and to make
us into the person we were created to be. But how much more work
will need to be done on us before we are perfect! I know John Wesley
believed that Christians could be perfect, but I also know I’m very
far from! And God still needs to do a great deal of work on me
before I fulfil my potential.

But the thing is, and
that’s where I got stuck as a young woman, we don’t have to do
it. And we don’t have to wait until it’s done before we can get
on with our lives as Christians, as God’s people. We have been put
right with God through faith, and now have peace with him through our
Lord Jesus Christ. So we can get on with our lives. Amen.

Welcome! I am a Methodist Local Preacher, and preach roughly once a month, or thereabouts. If you wish to take a RSS feed, or become a follower, so that you know when a new sermon has been uploaded, please feel free to do so.